“He was a monster,” Kertson told the Spokesman-Review. “A cougar that pushes 200 pounds… I don’t care where you are in the world, that’s pretty extraordinary.”

The animal was so strong that the first tranquilizer dart was ejected when the cat flexed its thigh muscle. “He almost looked cartoonish he was so big,” Kertson said, adding that photos do not accurately show the size of the animal. “He looked big in the tree. But it wasn’t until we had him on the ground that we were gobsmacked.”

Kertson said that as far as he knew, it was the largest mountain lion ever captured in Washington State, about 15 pounds heavier than the previous capture record.

The tracking expedition was part of a study to better understand interactions between cougars and wolves. Despite its size – the cougar’s head measured 22 inches in circumference – the cat was quickly treed once the dogs were on the scent.

It was eventually tranquilized and captured in a net, so a tracking collar could be fitted, and measurements taken. George the 9-year-old mountain lion has been preying mostly on elk.

Adult cougars typically prey on deer. But there seems to be nothing typical about this animal, which awoke and escaped about an hour after being tranquilized.

Kertson, who stands 6 feet 2 and weighs 260 pounds, told the Spokesman-Review that the cat’s forearms dwarfed his forearms.

As to interactions between cougars and wolves, Kertson said, “General dogma is that wolves are dominant to cougars. I’m a little more skeptical of that narrative.”

Video showing a scuba diver’s eerie swim through a sea of garbage off Bali this week vividly illustrates the alarming extent of plastic in our oceans.

Rich Horner used a pole-cam off Manta Point to show the extent to which non-biodegradable plastic and other garbage flows the currents around Bali and other Indonesian islands.

Manta Bay is a renowned diving and snorkeling destination. Giant mantas utilize the bay as a cleaning station – where tiny fish remove their parasites – and represent the primary allure for divers. But on this day it seemed best for humans and mantas to avoid the area or risk becoming ill.

“The ocean currents brought us in a lovely gift of a slick of jellyfish, plankton, leaves, branches, fronds, sticks, etc.... Oh, and some plastic,” Horner wrote on Facebook.

As bad as the pollution problem was during Horton’s dive, he said currents swept the area clean the following day. “As expected, the next day, what the currents bringeth, the currents taketh away!” Horton wrote.

“The divers who went to Manta Point today report they saw no plastic/trash at all. Great for the mantas coming in for a clean at the station, but, sadly the plastic is continuing on its journey, off into the Indian Ocean, to slowly break up into smaller and smaller pieces, into microplastics. But not going away.”